Sunday, July 31, 2016

Just as investors are implored to
invest in what they know, so are writers told to write about what they know. Yet,
it is far easier to invest in something you don’t know anything about than it
is to write about something you know nothing about.

In the first case, only you, your
financial advisor and perhaps your family know that you don’t know. In the
second case the whole world—that is, your readers—knows.

If you are a mother, the chances
are that you know your children better than anyone else. If you are a mother
and a writer, like Elizabeth Bastos, you have probably succumbed to the
temptation to write about your children, perhaps even ab ovo.

Why did Bastos do it? Simple,
there is a market for stories about childrearing. It isn’t exactly universal,
but great authors, from Charles Dickens to Henry James have written great works
about children. One might say that they did not write about their own children—James
was childless—but childrearing is certainly an apt topic for writers.

Of course, these writers tended to
observe certain cultural norms, the ones that dictate discretion.

Nowadays, these norms no longer
seem to apply. As Bastos points out, we live in a culture of oversharing, a
culture of shamelessness. This does not merely mean that the norms have broken
down, but that people are encouraged to expose their most intimate secrets to
the public eye. They are told that it is good for them and good for the
culture. They are told that shame is bad and that it represses your sexual
impulses. Thus, exposing yourself by letting it all hang out is good, Hiding
our private parts is bad.

I mention this just in case you
wanted to know why so many teenagers are engaged in the appalling practice of
sexting.

Culture warriors think that they
are the vanguard leading to the revolution. They are, in fact, promoting
decadence, leading to what Camille Paglia called cultural collapse.

For her part, Bastos had blogged
extensively about her children. People loved reading about them. But then, one
day, without thinking, she posted some remarks on the advent of her son’s
puberty.

She describes her work:

There
is a hunger in our culture for true stories from the parenting trenches where
life is lived mud-flecked and raw. I’ve written extensively, intimately,
damningly, about my children for seven years without once thinking about it from the point of view of
their feelings and their privacy. A few months ago I stopped.

What was it that brought her to her senses? She tells it
all:

I wish
I could say that I deeply reflected on the ethics of writing about
my children and heroically pivoted myself out of a concern for
my character, but here’s what really happened: My father called.

He
called me after reading a blog post I had written about my son’s
first signs of puberty. It seems an obvious line-crossing that I wrote
about such an intimate detail, but I did. At the time I didn’t pause for a
split second; I was more than willing to go there. I had been writing and reading extensively about
parenting tweens. I knew people might be mildly shocked, but mostly
interested.

Of course, people are interested:

We live
in a break-the-internet arms race of oversharing. And adolescent sexuality is
an emergent, fascinating topic, especially for parents who are figuring out how
to address difficult questions with their children.

But, in this case, her father knew best. And he tried,
delicately, to bring her to her senses, to allow her to reflect on what she was
doing, to recover her sense of shame.

The father’s rhetoric, I suggest,
is worth a few moments of thought. It is not accusatory. It does not tell her
what to do or what not to do. It suggests that she give more thought to what
she is doing. He is addressing an adult:

But
when my dad said, “Elizabeth, are you pausing to deeply consider what
you’re writing about?” I wanted to get defensive. I said, “Uh. I kinda perceive
myself as a confessional poet, Dad,” I said, “Heir to Plath, Sexton and Sharon
Olds. And the photographer Sally Mann, if I’m honest, Dad.”

But he
said, “I’m not talking about art. I’m talking about my grandson.”

And that is how a younger person, caught up in the thrill of
writing, rediscovered her responsibility as a parent, and, as quaint as it must
seem, her sense of shame.

She discovered that, Nora Ephron notwithstanding, not
everything is copy:

So
began my wrestling with my relationship with the Nora Ephron line, “Everything
is copy.” Until now it has been my battle cry and artistic excuse for
printing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted with very blinkered vision. Maybe,
in fact, not everything is copy. Maybe it’s people’s lives, and we should be
considerate and loving and respectful of their privacy. It’s a new point of
view for me in our clickbait culture of confessionalism and parading nakedness.

My
children didn’t give me their permission to tell their stories, or strike poses
in a waterfall, naked, gorgeous as all get out, and human, with lives ahead of
them, as Sally Mann posed hers. And now that I see that, I don’t want to mar my
children’s glory and subvert their beginnings for my so-called art.

Where should Bastos have drawn the line? At sex, of course.
Since shame is a universal sanction for exposing one’s private parts in public,
it ought also to apply to writing about a child’s sexuality.

Recovering her sense of shame left Bastos wanting a
subject. She could have continued writing certain things about her children. After all, her father did not object to anything but the reference to puberty.

And yet, she extrapolated his remark and chose to give her children back their complete privacy. Teenager are notoriously sensitive. If you do not know for sure what will and will not embarrass them, it is best to avoid the topic altogether. Now, after facing the choice of writing about what is inside herself or what is outside herself, she has chosen to write about things outside of herself. It
beats looking inside herself.

In the old days, and perhaps even today, artists learn to
draw by drawing models, not by searching their souls or the depths of their
being.

Obviously, the world is full of places, people and things to
write about. You readers might be fascinated by your children’s sexuality and by your children. True enough, not everything you write about your children
crosses the line that Bastos had crossed. But, why take the risk when you can
write about nature and the environment.

Bastos concluded:

If I’m
going to continue writing, I realize I need to find some new material, and for
that I’m going to have to look more deeply within myself or entirely outside. For inspiration I have
turned to writing about nature. The environment. The sea. Things that are
bigger than me. I’ve been reading John Muir. I’ve been reading “Braiding
Sweetgrass.” Nature is for all to see. Nurture is between me and my kids, off
the record.

1 comment:

Elizabeth Bastos: Maybe it’s people’s lives, and we should be considerate and loving and respectful of their privacy.

Such caution is important not just in public writing or personal biographies, but also in any sort of gossip situation.

And even the Golden rule isn't always helpful in deciding what can be shared and to who, since we're all different, so what would bother someone else might not bother you, and vice versa. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes is hard or impossible.

Perhaps anonymity can help, but only if you live in a world big enough to not be personally known by your readers.

I've had a couple friends who grew up in small towns and moved away, and both spoke largely negatively about the experience, being places where everyone knows everyone. And you imagine whether a mother is a writer or just a mother who needs to share her experiences, her stories will be told to neighbors, and children may be embarrassed by some of those stories repeated years and decades later.

Growing older, I've wondered if perhaps people who stay in small towns develop one set of skills for managing shame and privacy, and those that leave develop different skills.

I might imagine people who stay in a small town have a greater awareness of their ability to shame others unnecessarily, and learn ways to avoid this and help others "save face", but perhaps such places also have greater "secrets", things that everyone know shouldn't be discussed, even long after they need discussion.

On the other side, I imagine people who leave small towns feel an initial liberation from the prying eyes and ears, and can feel safe to judge people they've left behind, but then perhaps can disrespect others need for privacy, just because their own boundaries are now safe.

People like gossip, about other people. They want to know what's going on behind the calm exteriors. And like Celebrity culture in the widest sense, they want to know the Rich and Affluent suffer in moralities plays for their excesses. Its hard to imagine anyone with any sense of shame would choose to be the center of attention, knowing people will make shit up about you.

But if you're like Donald Trump, apparently there's no such thing as negative attention. If everything you can see is fake anyway, or truthful hyperbole as his ghostwriter says, any criticism can be managed and redirected into a new attack on someone else. That must must be a big-city skill?